Jenna Ellis, former President Donald Trump’s onetime campaign lawyer, read a tearful statement to an Atlanta courtroom on Tuesday morning while entering her guilty plea.
“If I knew then what I know now, I would have declined to represent Donald Trump in these post-election challenges,” Ellis told Judge Scott McAfee in a voice quavering with emotion. “I look back on this experience with deep remorse.”
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And with that, the already powerful case in Georgia against Trump for alleged election subversion grew more powerful still.
Georgia prosecutors scored a major victory by lining up three Trump-associated lawyers in less than a week, who all agreed to hand over documents and testify against him. These guilty pleas are both a crucial win for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, and a terrible omen for Trump. Of all the 19 codefendants, these lawyers are among those best equipped to evaluate the odds of defeating the prosecutors at trial—and they’re giving up, noted Titus Nichols, a Georgia defense attorney and former prosecutor in the Augusta District Attorney’s Office.
“The people you’d expect to have the best ability to fight back are all pleading guilty,” Nichols said. “If these lawyers thought the government’s case was weak, and that this was all grandstanding, they would have gone to trial.”
Ellis followed two other lawyers, the notoriously conspiracy-theory-prone Sidney Powell and more-buttoned-up Kenneth Chesebro, who both pled guilty last week just before their separate trial was to begin. In November 2020, Powell famously promised to “release the Kraken” on Trump’s opponents in court, a reference to the 2010 film Clash of the Titans. But her legal challenges flopped.
Instead, if anything, Trump’s legal advisors now seem to be gearing up to turn that mythic beast against Trump himself.
The fact that the high-profile Powell received no prison time, for example, suggests that prosecutors view her cooperation as highly damaging to the defense, said Kevin J. O’Brien, a former federal prosecutor turned white-collar criminal defense attorney.
“How could they give her such a great deal?” O’Brien asked. “My only answer to that is that she probably is incredibly valuable and has documents. And that’s worth its weight in gold.”
Powell was present at a notoriously heated meeting in the Oval Office in December 2020, where participants floated outlandish theories about the election, such as the idea that Venezuela had somehow been involved in meddling with the vote.
Thanks to their early guilty pleas, none of these lawyers is going to prison for their admitted crimes.
Ellis pleaded guilty to one felony count of aiding and abetting false statements, and received five years’ probation and will have to pay $5,000 in restitution. Powell pleaded guilty to six misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit election interference, and Chesebro pleaded guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to file false documents. Both received sentences of probation.
Their guilty pleas create new pressure on other defendants to follow suit, Nichols said, for fear of being left behind to battle a legal case that only grows stronger with each defection.
Others who wait to plead guilty later, however, may receive stiffer punishments than these first three, because prosecutors often give the best deals to those willing to plead guilty first and those who can provide the most valuable assistance.
The damage to Trump doesn’t even stop in Atlanta. These guilty pleas also strengthen the hand of Special Counsel Jack Smith in his federal case in Washington D.C. against Trump for alleged election subversion.
On Tuesday, ABC News reported that Trump’s ex-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows has spoken to Smith’s team three times this year after receiving immunity to testify under oath. Meadows reportedly told Smith that he warned Trump repeatedly that allegations of significant voting fraud were baseless, ABC News reported, citing unnamed sources.
Trump is the only named defendant in the D.C. case so far. But legal experts say the Georgia defendants’ decision to testify in Atlanta will likely be accompanied by similar moves in Smith’s federal case in Washington D.C., given all the similarities between them.
Smith could also subpoena any of the defendants from the Georgia case who have entered guilty pleas there and seek their testimony in his case as well. While the defendants could cite their Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination to decline to answer questions, Smith could also cut through that defense by offering them limited immunity, meaning they could not be prosecuted federally for what they say, unless they lie.
“Jack Smith has options here,” said Nichols. “They can’t just refuse to show up.”
And Ellis’ decision to flip and cooperate with prosecutors isn’t just bad news for Trump. It’s a particularly unwelcome development for longtime Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani. Ellis was a close collaborator with Giuliani in the days after the November 2020 election. The pair traveled the country together and reached out to local legislators as part of a broader effort to get states to overturn their elections.
During Ellis’ tearful statement to the court, she signaled a willingness to cast blame on other lawyers from Trump’s wack-a-doo team of legal advisors.
“I relied on others, including lawyers with many more years of experience than I, to provide me with true and reliable information, especially since my role involved speaking to the media and to legislators in various states,” Ellis said.
“What I did not do, but should have done, your honor, was to make sure that the facts the other lawyers alleged to be true were, in fact, true. In the frenetic pace of attempting to raise challenges to the election in several states including Georgia, I failed to do my due diligence,” she said.
Ellis didn’t have to make such a statement. She chose to. And that can’t be reassuring for Trump, Giuliani and other defendants in the case about how she’s about to handle what comes next.
